Happy.

It has not been the greatest of mornings. Today in things that are pissing me off: the government; mainstream shoe retailers never carrying women’s size nines; the washing-up monster threatening to overwhelm the kitchen; the government; Facebook; some jerk being offensive on TVTropes; this year’s stupid Breast Cancer ‘awareness’ I-like-it-on-the-sofa FB meme (how the fuck can you raise awareness of something IF YOU DON’T SAY WHAT IT IS? Oh wait, this is not about raising awareness of dying women, this is about getting living women to post vaguely suggestive things for the amusement of dudes.* As you were, then); and the government.

So this Feministe thread asking readers “What makes you happy?” made me pause, and take a breath, and think. There are a lot of big-picture things making me angry – quite often, where the bigness of the picture, and the consequent difficulty of changing it, is part of the problem – but not everything’s bad.

* The meme in question asks women to post the answer to “Where do you like to keep your handbag?” Not only is it stupid for the reasons outlined above, but also: I’ve written before about how heavily gendered – not sexed, gendered – an accessory the handbag is. For the billionth time: female does not imply feminine, feminine does not imply female, and the “hur hur women and their handbags” trope is getting seriously fucking old. Right now my big canvas Topman shoulder-bag is on the floor, but the next person who makes a crack about all those silly female women is liable to find it in their face.

You can get lactase capsules from Holland & Barrett and other healthfood-y supplement-y sort of shops – they’re strange and squishy and smell rather odd, and cost about a tenner for 60. I take them a few minutes before eating lactose-containing objects, and so far I’ve been fine. (Although I don’t have it especially severely, as far as I can tell – it doesn’t make me throw up or give me diarrhoea, just horrible abdominal cramps. And gas. I can eat cheese and butter without ill effects – it’s milk and cream that really do it.) I don’t know what sort of dosage you’d need, or if they’re available in Spain. But maybe something to look into?

To tell the truth, I’ve got so used to thinking of cheese and milk as “not food” that I’m not sure they’d be palatable to me even if they were digestible. But for cheesecake’s sake, I will take a look in the Bideford H&B the next time I visit home. (Lactose doesn’t cause so much of a problem around here — Catalan cuisine mainly centres on MEAT and BEANS.)

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